As requested by Steve, here is a summary of sorts of the non-ISO/IEC part of my notes to DFDL.

• The NCEO call (www.nceo.ac.uk, National Centre for Earth Obs or something to that effect) aims to link the five NERC data centres in the UK
• Additionally, they want the data to be more Useful™ so ability to link with other data sources
• As evidence of the latter, the three themes are green energy, climate change and food security
• First round of funding
• Academic users of EO data to capture requirements and a few other bits
• Expecting six groups funded, £10k each to work March-June, six short deliverables
• Deadline is Tuesday next week and we only just learned about the call so I have submitted a request for extension (though I am not eligible for funding myself, I don't think)
  
• Later industry will be brought in to build the infrastructure. My workplace hosts an industry information day 13 March (I will be there at least some of the day)
• The entire programme is £10M.
  

Both my boss and I have noted that it aligns with work we already wanted to do in DAFNI (www.dafni.ac.uk), data analysis facility for national infrastructure, where we have quite a few high profile climate emergency/resilience projects now. 

My interest is primarily exploring whether DFDL is useful in the plumbing for the data pipelines - the DAFNI ones may end up being similar to the NCEO ones as there are a lot of interconnection points (we have separate funding for this in another freshly minted £4M programme called BSRW, where we will also be funding research and development).  I also noted that IBM UK would likely be interested in being engaged as an industry bidder.

With apologies for derailing the agenda yesterday, it was nice to see the DFDL team again. I follow the mailing list and the github stuff but don't always have time to engage at the level I'd like, so it was nice to have the update from Mike as well.

Thanks
--jens